Recent Articles

— Seventy-six years ago this month at a quaint, 330-seat theater here called the Cape Cinema, "The Wizard of Oz" — believed to be the most-watched movie in history — premiered. That's right: Before its official 1939 debuts in Hollywood and New York a few days later, producers screened the colorful...

A heavily armed man in his early 20s, acting alone but perhaps radicalized by political resentments, opens fire in a sacred public space, killing several innocent and unarmed people in a sad tragedy that immediately sparks a national debate about the face of American terrorism. That's a reasonable...

Our political system remains polarized and divided between the two major parties, but in our present era of division the Republicans benefit from what I call four interconnected and mutually-reinforcing "structural asymmetries." Allow me to unpack each. The first is the turnout asymmetry: Republican...

The massacre by a young white man, according to police, of nine African Americans last week at a Charleston church Bible study has drawn the nation's attention to lingering racial hatred in America. If there is a more appropriate place to draw that attention than South Carolina, I don't know it....

During lectures and public appearances, I'm sometimes asked why Libertarians and other third-party movements make ample noise yet never win a sufficient number of elected offices in the United States to at least rattle the cages of the Democrats and Republicans, who have enjoyed their two-party...

So far, the 2016 Republican presidential primary is a complete puzzle to me. With as many as a dozen candidates likely to run, clearly top Republicans believe the GOP will recapture the White House next November. But first, the party must pick its nominee, and that choice will signal what type...

For daring to suggest that the social unrest in Baltimore following Freddie Gray's death was about race, I received the usual spate of critical emails. Many included one or both of two victim-blaming tropes. The first: For decades the city has been run by African Americans and Democrats, who only...

There are fires in Baltimore. This may add fuel to them, but so be it: Freddie Gray's April 19th death while in police custody is almost entirely about race. Sure, it's about community policing policies and standards. It's also about the economic disparities that paralyze many of Baltimore's poorest...